Unraveling the developmental dynamic of visual exploration of social interactions in autism.

Atypical deployment of social gaze is present early on in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Yet, studies characterizing the developmental dynamic behind it are scarce. Here, we used a data-driven method to delineate the developmental change in visual exploration of social interaction over childhood years in autism.

Human noise blindness drives suboptimal cognitive inference.

Humans typically make near-optimal sensorimotor judgements but show systematic biases when making more cognitive judgements. Here we test the hypothesis that, while humans are sensitive to the noise present during early sensory encoding, the "optimality gap" arises because they are blind to noise introduced by later cognitive integration of variable or discordant pieces of information. In six psychophysical experiments, human observers judged the average orientation of an array of contrast gratings.

A Network for Computing Value Equilibrium in the Human Medial Prefrontal Cortex.

Humans and other animals make decisions in order to satisfy their goals. However, it remains unknown how neural circuits compute which of multiple possible goals should be pursued (e.g.

Gain control explains the effect of distraction in human perceptual, cognitive, and economic decision making.

When making decisions, humans are often distracted by irrelevant information. Distraction has a different impact on perceptual, cognitive, and value-guided choices, giving rise to well-described behavioral phenomena such as the tilt illusion, conflict adaptation, or economic decoy effects. However, a single, unified model that can account for all these phenomena has yet to emerge.

Robust averaging protects decisions from noise in neural computations.

An ideal observer will give equivalent weight to sources of information that are equally reliable. However, when averaging visual information, human observers tend to downweight or discount features that are relatively outlying or deviant ('robust averaging'). Why humans adopt an integration policy that discards important decision information remains unknown.

Robust sampling of decision information during perceptual choice.

Humans move their eyes to gather information about the visual world. However, saccadic sampling has largely been explored in paradigms that involve searching for a lone target in a cluttered array or natural scene. Here, we investigated the policy that humans use to overtly sample information in a perceptual decision task that required information from across multiple spatial locations to be combined.

Adaptive gain control during human perceptual choice.

Neural systems adapt to background levels of stimulation. Adaptive gain control has been extensively studied in sensory systems but overlooked in decision-theoretic models. Here, we describe evidence for adaptive gain control during the serial integration of decision-relevant information.